Google Reveals Transparency Report Page to Fight Censorship

Google has now unveiled a set of tools which, it says, should help deter governments from abusing their position when it comes to data removal requests.

Google has had more than a few run-ins with government, at either side of the spectrum, either coming under attack by governments, usually over privacy, or criticizing governments for their abuses.

"To promote transparency around this flow of information, we’ve built an interactive online Transparency Report with tools that allow people to see where governments are demanding that we remove content and where Google services are being blocked," David Drummond, SVP, Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer at Google announced.

The tools are available over at the new Transparency Report page. The tools themselves are not entirely new, but the dedicated page is.

In the Traffic section of the new page, users will be able to check out the flow of visitors to any Google property for periods of time going back years.

This way, Google says, users will know why a particular service is unavailable or at least they'll know they're not the only ones with the problem.